After returning from the Peace Corps in 2011, Tiago Forte moved to San Francisco to join a product development consulting firm. There he learned the power of design in helping some of the world’s most innovative companies bring new products to market. Working amidst technology startups in the heart of Silicon Valley, and later starting his own productivity training business, Forte Labs, he became obsessed with a single question: “What is the future of work?”
Design Your Work chronicles his journey to answer that question, in 16 essays written between 2014 and 2016. Previously published on the Praxis blog, they’ve been edited and updated here for clarity and accuracy. The essays touch on topics ranging from meditation to science fiction, habit formation to network science, metaphysics to gratitude, organizational theory to email workflows, innovation to mood-hacking, and much more.
Tiago’s writing reflects his unusual ability to connect the abstract and the practical, and converges on a theme: the theory and practice of modern knowledge work − how it is defined, how it is practiced, and how it is evolving.
This collection explores an overarching idea: that you can design your work. You can adapt, tweak, customize, and reframe any part of it, from how you process emails, to how you organize information, to how you structure your attention, to how you measure your performance.